Whenever I have to solder up LED arrays in the back of my head I'm thinking "gee, in the end I'm only getting about 32x32 pixels out of this thing (for 1024 LEDs)." In your case it's about 47x47, but still, the square factor just kills me.

Anyway, I'm sure the suit will be awesome!

"The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law." -- Christopher Hitchens

Oh.. this is coming to the 2012 burn. Believe that. The first photo is actually about a month old.. I've been soldering my fingers to the bone for a little bit now.

Anyway.. let's begin, shall we?

Background:

Many of you may remember the LED suit that I built last year. This was my very first LED project and pretty much my first real embedded electronics project of any kind besides designing and installing audio systems and basic electrical work through the years.. along with my first major playa-bound art piece. Oh, the places I went with those things. The response on the playa was OVERWHELMING. People riding bikes/walking across the entire open playa to see what it was they were seeing in the distance.. just to finally get up to where I was and see that it was a person. Bikes and jaws would drop.. high fives would ensue.. you name it. The sheer awe factor combined with actual factual gratitude for building and bringing something like that to the burn was a feeling that I'll never forget. The feeling you get from putting tens if not hundreds of hours into art just to blow peoples minds is a great motivating factor.

However, the major design flaw of my previous design was one of durability. When building a wearable electronics piece for anything but especially for the playa, the NUMBER ONE factor needs to be durability. You're going to walk 20 miles in whatever you build.. flexing, moving, dancing, sitting, etc. It will get warm, it will get cold, it will move, it will flex. It needs to be built absolutely bulletproof.

The problem was primarily using fabric rectangles for the backing material to create the LED panels with and simply soldering and twisting the LED pins together. As I would move and walk through the night, the fragile connections would break and by the morning, I would have 40% of the panels having sections out in them. Sitting for 2 hours every high noon on the playa fixing your creation for the next night sucks. No. We weren't doing that again.

So, the design improvement goals for this project were:

- DURABILITY. Let's make this thing bulletproof to not only last the burn, but a lifetime.- Ease of assembly. The last suit took me literally 200+ hours of solid work to poke, twist, solder and sew.- Some type of diffusion for the LEDs to not make them quite so directional- MORE LIGHTS!

When I design anything with multiple components that assemble to form a major end result, I tend to work backwards off of my design goals.

The number one goal for this was durability via the rigidity and reliability of the LED panels. The best and most durable option was to create actual circuit boards (PCBs) to solder the LEDs directly to. Attach those reliably by some manner to the garments and we would be in business.

For the ease of assembly goal along with the strength goal, I would use nylon nuts and bolts to attach the PCBs to the garments.

For the colors, I agonized over the decision. The sequencer is 8 channels with multiple patterns so I wanted to stick with two colors in a direct linear pattern in order to get the full sequencing visual effect. I did blue/green last year and LOVED the futuristic, TRON look that it gave.. but was reluctant to do the same thing. I considered everything.. pink/green, red/yellow, blue/purple.. but in the end.. gave in to the blue/green again.

First, the PCB/LED panel design.

For the battery source, I planned on using the same 18v battery pack since I knew from the previous design that multiple chains of 5 LEDs using a 100ohm-150ohm resistor would give me the perfectly sized grid that I was looking for. Using the LED wizard, I plugged in my 18v source voltage, a 3.2v forward voltage for the blue/green LEDs, 20 mA forward current and 35 LEDs.. and bam.. 100 ohm / 1/4w resistors. Easy enough!

So, I downloaded, installed and began walking through the YouTube videos to learn this thing. It was fun! It honestly felt just like learning to use an Adobe program. You start from the beginning and just work up.

Since last year my panels were 2" x 7", I wanted to stick with that height but have them a little longer in order to wrap around my legs for better visibility as well as the design goal of MORE LIGHTS! They needed to allow flex.. so I would have to use multiple panels in a row. I decided on using 3 - 2.25 x 3.25 (roughly) panels in a row for each channel containing 7 rows of 5 LEDs connected in series. This would give me 35 LEDs per PCB, or 105 LEDs per channel per leg for the pants and 35 LEDs per channel per arm for the top. 2,240 total LEDs divided among 8 sequenced channels. 4mm holes on all 4 corners for attachment.

The first step is designing your schematics graphically:

Then, you hit a button and the program converts it into an actual PCB board. You drag and drop the pieces where you want them, run the trace routes, add some silkscreen and voila! You have yourself your very own custom circuit board: Yes.. I did make a mistake on the silkscreen layer that wasn't caught until after it was submitted. Gold star to the first person that catches it.

I did some research, and used a company called Silver Circuits for the PCB fabrication. The total cost delivered to my door came out to $2.33/each for 130 of them. I made enough to do my project and a few others. Really not a bad price for your own custom panels! So.. here is the finished fruit of my labor in designing my first custom PCB:

WOOHOO! Such a cool feeling to see your own custom work immortalized in a shiny green PCB, I have to admit. Now.. for the fun part.. the soldering and actual construction!

Before you do anything, you need the proper tools for the job. Luckily, things these days are pretty reasonably priced for what you get.

The core of everything is a good quality soldering station. I found the X-Tronic 6000 series soldering station that came bundled with 10 extra tips, multiple hot air gun attachments, solder pen rest and even a fluorescent work light for $135 shipped. It has worked flawlessly and does everything that I need it to do. I honestly cannot believe that I did my entire project last year with a simple Weller soldering pen. Insane.

From left to right in the picture:

- Mastech MS8268 digital multimeter with built in auto ranging and backlight. Anyone working with any kind of electronics in any capacity needs a good multimeter! Essential. $24 shipped. Awesome meter for virtually pennies!

- Simple needle nose pliers for pulling through the resistors and general grabbing

- Xuron 170-II Micro-Shear Flush Cutters.. awesome little precision cutters under $8! Sharp as heck.. great for any hobbyist. Perfect for shearing and trimming the soldered pins from the PCB and general wire cutting. Love these things.

- Hakko soldering top cleaner.. It used to be that when you soldered, you would wipe the tip on a wet sponge to clean. You'll build globs of solder on the tip as you work so for precision, you need to be wiping it every few connections or so. Now, the best mechanism is a brass scouring pad type of material. A couple of good pokes and it's clean and ready to use again. Giggity giggity

- Self adjusting wire strippers!! Waxpraxis turned me on to these last year and my god.. I can't believe that I lived my life this long while playing with electronics and never owned a pair. Totally auto adjusting.. just put wire in, squeeze once and out comes a perfectly stripped wire. Life savers.

Oh, the mental visuals of this project. 2000+ fully sequenced green and blue LEDs flowing down my body with 4" thick blue and green laser photon beams going straight up in the sky.

As a reference, the One Mile Clock last year used a (supposedly rated by a now proven untrustworthy seller)1000mW green laser with a 10x beam expander on it. In the first mile, 300mW should be comparable in visibility as far as side beam goes. Blue laser light is only fractionally as visible as green laser light, so even though the blue laser is 5 times as powerful as the green, the visibility is about the same if not slightly less than the 300mW green.

Disclaimer: Yes, I have experience with high powered lasers. Yes, I wear safety goggles when I test/play with them. No, I don't ever point them at anyone at any time. Yes, you treat them like a loaded gun.

Last edited by junglesmacks on Tue Jun 26, 2012 7:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

BBadger wrote:At least you didn't buy them from a certain company with "Wicked" in its name. That would be a travesty.

I KNOW. Half the power and all the money! Bullshit. I even contacted the company that 1 Mile Clock used and pressed the guy about his cheap lasers and told him that I wanted to power test them and publicly post the results. He admitted that everything was pretty much half the advertised power. Caveat emptor!

Oh absolutely. Something with full control RGB is up for next year.. especially since I've spent the last year playing with the WS2801 strips extensively and may or may not have designed a custom controller for them. The main thing is the cost prohibitive factor. I love the WOW factor of multi thousands of LEDs.. and they're just too expensive still to really pull it off. The cheapest that I can find the LEDs for is around $0.15 vs $0.02 for the single colors. That's not bad when you compare everything.. but it was also a time issue. I just had so much on my plate this last year..

What I'd love to do is the same general concept but using 5mm RGB common cathode LEDs.. use an Arduino/Atmel type controller with MOSFET regulated output per channel.. and then have full color/sequence control.

Using a ton of pre-made strips for clothing is something that I'm wary about for the durability factor. There is a guy on here that's attempting to hot glue a bunch of them to the inside of his fur jacket as a first time project and I'm nervously waiting for it to all end in tears once he gets it out there on the playa. As I learned last year, it's one thing to conceptualize and build it in your living room.. and an entirely different thing to party your ass off in it at Burning Man.

junglesmacks wrote:The cheapest that I can find the LEDs for is around $0.15 vs $0.02 for the single colors. That's not bad when you compare everything.. but it was also a time issue. I just had so much on my plate this last year..

Ohh, that's much lower than what I saw. Especially the RGBs. Do you have a source for those?

junglesmacks wrote:The cheapest that I can find the LEDs for is around $0.15 vs $0.02 for the single colors. That's not bad when you compare everything.. but it was also a time issue. I just had so much on my plate this last year..

Ohh, that's much lower than what I saw. Especially the RGBs. Do you have a source for those?

Ebay for both. Best approach is to find a seller with a high rep and good price and then email them with what you want and negotiate from there. I have some contacts in China for other LED components and still they can't seem to beat some of those Ebay sellers..

The only downside to buying loose LEDs through Ebay is that you don't always know what you're going to get. I had some loose LEDs left over from last year and ordered some more this year to fill in for a couple of side projects and the shades of colors was totally different than the original ones. The new white was BRIGHT dazzling white instead of the more warm white from last year and the pink was a super beautiful shade of magenta/fuchsia vs hotter, lighter pink from last year. Trick there is to make sure to order what you need at the moment.

One seller on Ebay that I can recommend with confidence as I've purchased thousands and thousands of LEDs from him is this one. Arrives at my door in 10 days. Using 22 of these panels in pink and green for the girl's white fur jacket sewn underneath and fully sequenced..

Yeah, those eBay sellers have some pretty insanely low prices, some as low as $128 for 1000pcs (search for "RGB common anode 1000"). It's a far cry from the $1/pc prices from shops in the US, and I really don't think there's a difference in quality in many cases. Some of the US-based eBay stores are nice for getting stuff in a timely manner, such as those auto-changing RGB LEDs; I've bought LEDs from FCB Electronics and they're pretty good, though the prices are about 2x the stores in Hong Kong.

"The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law." -- Christopher Hitchens

Props junglesmacks! Will look for you out there. I have a feeling you may be easy to spot. I love the way the lighting highlights and amplifies your arm and leg movements! Makes you seem superhuman. Also there are some really cool shadow effects going on in the room -- I bet this is bright enough to work as a strobe light! You should try some strobing patterns. That would be fun to dance with!

I made a mini-cubatron this year. It lives inside a lantern that I carry around. If you see it, that's me. (Video after the playa, maybe.)